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By
Jeff Gordon
The appeal of triple-play
or quad-play to communications service
providers (CSPs) is clear: Providing
more services translates into bigger
market share, more revenue, and higher
customer lifetime value. But fail
to provide adequate customer support
for these services, and you may lose
out on these benefits. Millions of
dollars invested in networks, infrastructure,
and marketing may ultimately be wasted
if your customers cancel or fail to
use services due to frustration or
lack of understanding. This is just
one reason customer service is increasingly
becoming a strategic differentiator
for CSPs.
Service bundling may ultimately benefit
the customer and the CSP, but it poses
an unprecedented challenge to customer
service. This challenge comes at a
troubling time for the customer care
industry; statistics show that customer
satisfaction levels across all industries
have flattened or declined over the
past few years, even as spending on
customer care continues to surge (see
chart).
Merely adding staff, or striving
to improve existing metrics, just
won’t cut it anymore. We need
a new paradigm for customer care.
In this new paradigm, customers will
see the CSP as an active partner in
solving problems and making life easier.
To fulfill this goal, companies will
utilize new channels and new technologies
(such as IP) to understand and interact
with customers in ways never before
possible.
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Service
bundling may ultimately benefit the customer
and the CSP, but it poses an unprecedented
challenge to customer service. |
James
Canton, the futurist who
addressed our 2007 Convergys
Executive Forum in January,
predicts that “the
increasing complexity and
sophistication of products
and services will increasingly
tax the competencies of customer
care professionals, and will
continue to frustrate consumers
if they’re not getting
their needs met.”
Changing the paradigm of
customer care requires “converging” on
the customer’s needs:
That is, reorienting processes
and attitudes towards a customer-centered
view. At Convergys, we believe
the customer care center
of the future will have four
key elements: proactive
care, automation effectiveness,
agent efficiency and customer
value optimization. Let’s
explore what each of these
will mean in practice.
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The Missing Link in Convergence
CSPs
are aiming at convergence, but the
customer care paradigm must converge
as well. At the moment, we’re
a long way away from that goal.
Multi-company partnerships are needed
to build and maintain the devices, applications,
and networks that make converged devices
function optimally. With so many players,
a customer may not always know whom
to call when there’s a problem.
And when a customer does call, she is
too often bounced like a pinball from
agent to agent, or from company to company.
At each stop she must wait in hold queues
and retell her story. Then she must
wait some more as agents scroll through
pages of data in search of information.
For customers increasingly accustomed
to solutions “on demand,”
it can be a maddening experience.
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Proactive Care
It is said that we live in
the information age, yet contact centers
often seem information-starved. Businesses
gather terabytes of data on their customers’
context, transaction history,
and inclinations. Their staffs
are experts on the benefits
and flaws of their own products
and services. Yet this knowledge
is seldom used to improve
the customer experience in
real time.
Instead, businesses
wait until a problem prompts
a frustrated customer to
reach out for help. If the
customer doesn’t feel
his personal needs are being
met via automation, he or
she will demand attention
from a live agent. Even if
the problem is resolved,
the customer’s time
has been wasted, and the
company has fielded an expensive
call.
In the future, customer care operations
will leverage the information at
their disposal to proactively reduce
both costs and consumer aggravation.
Businesses have more ways
than ever to communicate
with customers. So why not use them?
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